No Sunrises, No Sunsets, Lots of Changes

Deborah Wesley photograph

Wildfires are currently burning (as of Wednesday morning) in the U.S. states of Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, Washington, as well as in western Canadian provinces (from British Columbia to Newfoundland but mostly from western Ontario to the Pacific Ocean). Since prevailing winds blow west to east across North America, air quality in the Midwest and all the way to the eastern seaboard is affected. The only escape is indoors, but who wants to stay indoors all summer? Some people must; others of us are taking our chances, despite the occasional cough. (Don't scold, please! I won't live forever!) My two younger sisters from Illinois came for a visit, and we spent time outdoors each day. 

Three sisters -- yes, styles have changed, too.

My sister Deborah also spent considerable time spoiling Sunny Juliet—that is, tossing tennis balls out in the yard for a certain lucky dog girl to chase. When all three of us were outside, Sunny still brought her tennis balls to Auntie Deborah rather than to her dog mom. No fool, my Sunny!

I finished In the Merrimack Valley: A Farm Trilogy with a big sigh. Like The Vacation, by Carlos Fuentes, and This Magnetic North, by Tim Mulherin, Jane Brox’s book is a story of change. I guess that is the story of life, isn’t it? Change! I learned a few things in the Brox book, and one of those things is that big bluestem (Andropogon gerardi), a native prairie grass I seeded into the edge of my meadow 25 years ago—a native grass, mind you, not an invasive alien—can nevertheless outcompete other plant species. Now I’m thinking maybe that’s what happened to those purple coneflowers that failed to appear last summer after a quarter-century. The little grey-headed coneflowers are holding their own, so far, but the purple ones have vanished. 

Gone with the wind! Here they were years ago.

These are still with me...

co-existing, for now, with big bluestem.

A meadow, a forest, even a roadside changes from year to year. About three years ago I noticed a little bright yellow flower blooming on the side of M-22 just north of Fischer’s Happy Hour Tavern. Birdsfoot trefoil (Lotus corniculatus) is a nitrogen-fixing legume, but it is invasive and aggressive, forming root mats that crowd out native plant roots, and this year I am noticing it blooming all up and down M-22. Spreading rapidly! So, pretty though it is, I will not be transplanting any to my meadow, which changes just gradually enough (except for the disappearance of purple coneflowers) that I manage to accept the differences from one year to the next. 

Birdsfoot trefoil

This Saturday (already!!!) is Northport’s annual dog parade—and how many does this make? My old Nikki was in the parade back in 1997 ("Mardi Growl”) and again in 1998 (“Treasures of King Mutt”).

Memorabilia! Priceless!

Our Sarah made one parade appearance. That year (2010, and you can find Bettie and Ben and Gracie and Sarah by following this link) my sister and her husband were visiting, along with our mother and their dog, Gracie, so Ben and Bettie each had charge of a dog while I stayed near my shop, watching the parade with our mother. Mother is gone, Gracie and Sarah are gone. More changes…. But the dog parade goes on, this year as “Bone Appétit.” (Note: That final 't' is silent.)

The pretty Bernese below made her first bookstore visit—first time in any bookshop—to Dog Ears! She will have moved on from Northport before parade time, but we commemorated her inaugural bookshop visit with a photo shoot.

My own general view of change (returning to my theme) is that I can handle it better if and when it’s gradual rather than overnight. How about you? 

Please come for guest author Tim Mulherin’s talk at Dog Ears Books on Wednesday, August 13, starting at 7 p.m. The topic will be changes in our own Northern Michigan! 

The book for August 13 event

Author Tim Mulherin

Raspberries, Books, and Eudaimonia

Sunny harvesting black raspberries

Too tired after a very busy bookshop day to make another batch of jam on Wednesday evening, I fell asleep over a book until awakened by high winds and rain battering the front porch windows. Time to close windows and go to bed. Up early in the morning, there was time for jam-making, even for a second cup of coffee. 

Mixed with Bardenhagen strawberries

Coming to a rolling boil

My evening reading this week is The Merrimack Valley: A Farm Trilogy, by Jane Brox, which is not the idyllic escape reading you might imagine from the title. Her grandparents came as immigrants, mother’s parents from Italy, father’s from what was then Syria, and life was not a bowl of cherries for anyone. As the author saw local history, stories of “failure” flowed through the lives of valley inhabitants, from indigenous peoples forced out by Europeans to later small farm operators pressured to sell out for financial reasons. Where one generation struggled to make a living, newcomers brought with them (or adopted) different ways of life, and the older ways of living on the land were supplanted by newer methods and technologies, as well as suburban encroachment. 

There was no way to compete with crops being grown more cheaply and efficiently on better soils, or soils that simply had not yet been exhausted. The poorer upland farms were the first to go, though I still see one now and again—a handful of cattle wandering a rocky slope or picking out grasses among the pines, a wrackline of saved, rusted machinery alongside the house. One light selves the night, and every time I pass by I wonder who or how?

- Jane Brox, In the Merrimack Valley: A Farm Trilogy 

The author’s parents hung on in the stony valley. Early on, the family’s original 35 acres deeded to an immigrant grandfather in 1902, though small by standards farther west, was large enough to sustain a dairy herd. When the dairy operation was no longer feasible, her father kept working the orchards (mainly apples) and fields of the popular vegetables (he saved Hubbard squash seed every year) that the family sold at their roadside farmstand each year. Jane made a place in the stand for fresh herbs, but it was corn and tomatoes and beans, squash and pumpkins that the customers wanted. Those and the apples.

Anyone who would plant an orchard must be undaunted by time, willing to wait long years with little chance of seeing the finest seasons. And since an orchard is land narrowed to one crop only, anyone who would plant an orchard must abide by the final decisions. The chosen rootstock, size, variety, the methods of pruning, are promises that can’t be gone back on, promises requiring care to the end.

An orchard is a commitment.

A third-generation Leelanau farmer grows cherries around my home on land leased from another neighbor, but Jane and her sister left their Massachusetts farm, while their brother’s drug use, celibacy (no children to help on the farm), and general unreliability made him an unlikely candidate for another farming generation. Her parents growing old, Jane came home and tried to work with her brother but found it impossible. Then their father died. 

Jane Brox is a poet. (Her father had a hard time seeing writing as work—the fate of many artists whose parents shake their heads over their children's life choices.) Because she lives by words and employs them so masterfully, her stories of “failure” have a beauty not found in most stories of what the world deems success, and even if history is a tragic progression through time (as it so often seems), surely the finding and sharing and preserving of beautiful moments is a worthwhile life’s work. But I have only just begun reading the second book in the Brox trilogy so cannot tell you where it will go in the end. 

My current morning reading (one book for bedtime, another to start a new day) pleases me in a different way.

Aristotle’s Way: How Ancient Wisdom Can Change Your Life was written for a popular audience by one of the foremost classicists in England, Edith Hall, a professor at Kings College, London. Dr. Hall, however, the first woman to have been awarded the Erasmus Medal of the European Academy, is no narrow scholar, and the way she champions Aristotle is, to me, absolutely delightful--undoubtedly because (I admit) it affirms my own preference for Aristotle over Socrates and Plato. 

In her introduction, Hall directly addresses the question of Aristotle’s views on women and slaves, the most troublesome parts of his philosophy for those of us who love all the rest. “I stress,” she writes, “Aristotle’s consistency in arguing that all opinions must always be open to revision."

If you receive incontrovertible evidence that your opinion is wrong, then changing your mind, which some people might condemn as inconstancy, is worthy of high praise. ...[So] I like to think that if we could talk to Aristotle, we could persuade him to revise his opinion on the female brain.

- Edith Hall, Aristotle’s Way: How Ancient Wisdom Can Change Your Life

(And his opinion of slavery, as well, I would add.)

Hall admires Aristotle for the same reasons I hold his writings dear: Aristotle did not see human embodiment as loathsome or regrettable, and he neither accepted nor promulgated absolute rules for behavior. (Dr. Hall finds his writings in many ways “very modern.”) He was interested in the entire physical world (not only life in the polis), in the senses and the emotions, and he was very concerned with the practical matter of how human beings could live good lives.

What was a good, happy life? How could it be achieved? Aristotle wondered about and pondered many aspects of the universe but perhaps this above all—eudaimonia, the good life.

Aristotle thought that general principles are important, but without taking into account the specific circumstances, general principles can often be misleading. This is why some Aristotelians call themselves ‘moral particularists.’ Each situation and dilemma requires detailed engagement with its nitty-gritty particulars.

I love Aristotle’s metaphysics, in that there are no ghostly (Platonic) Forms apart from matter, and I love his idea of the soul (the beginning of action) and his fascination with all of living nature, but it is the primacy of his ethics that, for me, too, makes his philosophy important. Edith Hall’s contention is that his way of looking at Aristotelian ethics is as relevant today as it was for the ancient Greeks. 

I am only in the initial pages of this book but already so excited by it that I couldn’t wait to write something here on the blog and have ordered a couple new paperback copies for store stock. Not that I expect everyone to start loving philosophy, but doesn’t everyone want to be happy? And what if, as Aristotle believed, it is impossible to be happy without trying also to be good? How can you live in such a way as to be happier, no matter what your life situation? 

Confession: I do not wake up happy every day. I miss my life partner, the Artist. Nightmare gremlins can hang on into the morning dark, too. Then, taking only one day off from my bookshop a week this summer and still having a dog to exercise, laundry to do, grass to mow, and gardens to water and weed, I occasionally feel overwhelmed, because whatever needs doing in my home or business, if I don't do it, it doesn't get done.

So it takes dog kisses and good coffee to put me in a better morning mood and remind me what a fortunate life I have. My own bookshop? Sunny Juliet? An old farmhouse with trees and flowers and room for Sunny to play? How lucky is that? It's the life the Artist and I dreamed about for years before we were able to make the dream come true, and I still have everything but him—which is a huge, unfillable lacuna, but still, every moment and every inch of my life is enriched by memories of our life together.

Picking berries and making jam, which seems today like a never-ending task, will soon be at an end for another year, and the fruits of my labors will last all winter long. Come January, I'll be spreading summer sunshine on my toast and sharing it with family and friends. And yes, I can afford to become a sustaining member of Interlochen Public Radio, too. I don’t want to imagine northern Michigan without that resource, and thinking about Aristotle and eudaimonia has inspired me to step up. 

Life is not always easy, but it is good.

Sunny says, "Life is good, and ricotta is delicious!"

May: One for the Books

Ground painted with sweeps of hawkweed --

May disappeared much too fast, as my "Books Read 2024" continued from #79 through #96. One book I re-read for the umpteenth time (The Haunted Bookshop), several were very short, and The Past Recaptured I re-read off and on starting in the beginning of the winter, only reaching the last page, finally -- reluctantly! -- a few days ago. If I had to select only one book to recommend from my May reading list, it would have to be Committing Journalism (comment following the title in the list will tell you why), but there are other worthwhile books here, also, so take a look and see if anything moves you.

 

Images today are from a drive I took (with Sunny) on Sunday down through Benzie County and over the border into Manistee County, soaking up the scenery.

Not in Europe, so, not a castle in ruins....

Morley, Christopher. The Haunted Bookshop (fiction). See this post for details.

 

Banks, Russell. Foregone (fiction). A famous Canadian documentary filmmaker is dying and wants to talk honestly about his early life, on film, for the first time. He feels he owes that honesty to his wife but can only lie to her unless a camera is there as witness. Fife (the man’s name) drifts between past and present, attended by his wife, his nurse, and the film crew headed by one of his former students. At the end I found myself if he had imagined all of it as he died. You tell me.

 

Lahey, Anita. The Last Goldfish: A True Tale of Friendship (nonfiction). What makes a friendship special when you’re young, and what makes it last? How do you stand by your best friend from 9^th grade to age 22 when you realize she really is dying? How do you balance honesty with positivity? And when she’s gone, how do you go on without her?

 

Malamud, Bernard. Dubin’s Lives (fiction). The protagonist is a biographer and often referred to as “the biographer” rather than by name. Does he investigate the lives of others rather than living his own? Harsh focus on marriage (separate from “love”), but most disappointing to me was the lack of anything that might be called a climax or an epiphany. I’ve complained before about novelists who slam the door after their novel’s climax, giving us no denouement, but in this novel Malamud jumps straight from a meandering story line to a brief dénouement, leaving a tangle of unsatisfying loose ends.

 

Brodsky, Joseph. Watermark (nonfiction). A slender volume that is not exactly essays or memoir but certainly not a novel, Watermark defies classification. That a poet would write poetic prose is no surprise, and the sentences are beautiful; however, I advise not trying to make sense of every subject-verb statement. Better simply to let yourself drift sybaritically in Brodsky’s impressions of Venice, rocked by its watery waves.

 

Toews, Miriam. All My Puny Sorrows (fiction). I laughed out loud several times while reading the first chapter of this Canadian novel of two Mennonite sisters. Sisters in the backseat of the car, parents up front, long trip: a recipe for hilarity. Then a suicide attempt by the older sister, now a concert pianist, in the second chapter. Not so funny. But I stuck with it and am glad I did – not just for the laughs that reprised in the last few pages, either. “Life is a strange old ‘possum,” as someone I used to know used to say. But there’s also love.

 

McGarey, Gladys, M.D. (nonfiction). The Well-Lived Life: A 102-Year-Old Doctor’s Six Secrets to Health and Happiness at Every Age (nonfiction). A good friend recently widowed insisted that I borrow and read this book, and now I am thinking of so many friends with whom I would also like to share it. A centenarian and medical doctor, Dr. McGarey spent much of her childhood in India with her parents and siblings. Herself the mother of six children, divorced (not her decision) after almost 50 years of marriage, she is someone with a lot of life experience, and she has distilled for us young 'uns what she has learned along the way. Someone whose advice is worth heeding.

 

Goodman, Allegra. The Family Markowitz (fiction). I always enjoy Goodman’s fiction, and this early novel of hers was no exception. The family dynamics and characters’ shifting emotional responses are completely familiar. Sarah is nurturing matriarch, easing the way for her husband and mother-in-law, as well as the younger generations, but the author shifts seamlessly from one character’s inner self to another’s. Masterful.

Arikawa, Hiro. The Travelling Cat Chronicles (fiction). A small novel in size of book and length of story (the cover is beautiful), largely not exclusively narrated by the cat, did not thoroughly overcome my resistance to its cuteness. Was it too cute? I was not won over, though I had hoped to be. 

 

Bennett, Alan. The Uncommon Reader (fiction). Absolutely charming! Late in life, the Queen of England takes up reading, much to the alarm of her staff and almost everyone else. Then she goes a step further and announces that she is going to write a book! Could anyone read this tiny book (not much over 100 pages) without laughing out loud? I could not. 

 

Berry, Wendell. Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer (nonfiction). If I were to write something like this, it would be WIANGTB a Dishwasher or …a Garbage Disposal or …a Self-Propelled Lawnmower or a Computerized Cash Register for My Business or Central (Or Any Other Kind of) Air Conditioning for My Home. But I do have a laptop computer, and I am keeping this list on it and writing my blog posts with it, so there you are, but I love his arguments and would never argue against his conclusion.

Closed! That made me sad.

Martin, Dannie M. & Peter Y. Sussman. Committing Journalism: The Prison Writings of Red Hog (nonfiction). If you are an American taxpayer, you should read this book. What kind of punishments do you feel are deserved, and what do you think our prisons accomplish? How much do you know about what we call the justice system, and how much do you know about incarceration? Opinions without information are worse than no opinions at all.

Arcadia Marsh -- a watery wonderland!

Wodehouse, P. G. Jeeves (fiction). One night I needed a silly, trivial, pointless book, and Jeeves fit the bill.

 

de Lafayette, Marie-Madeleine. The Princess of Clèves (fiction). Persevering through the confusing and tedious opening pages, at last I reached the story proper and read through to the end of this period classic of French literature. There! That’s done! I must admit it was, though somewhat turgid, suspenseful and the end surprising, and I’m glad I read it, although it’s not something I expect to re-read.

Always impressive Lake Michigan view

Hughes, Dorothy B. In a Lonely Place (fiction). From classic French to classic noir was quite a transition. The suspense in this novel is not in whodunit but in how long he will escape detection and how he will finally meet his end. Perhaps unfairly, I read it as another reason to say “No, thank you” to California. (Very subjective response, I realize.)

 

Proust, Marcel. The Past Recaptured (fiction). This re-reading spread itself out over many, many weeks, as I turned to Proust again and again between other bedtime books. “Eternal existence is not promised to books any more than to men,” he wrote, and yet the life of Proust’s epic work seems only to gain vitality as years go by. I used to say (thinking myself witty) that life was “too short to read Proust.” Later I realized that it too short not to read him.

 

Tey, Josephine. A Daughter of Time (fiction). Apprehensive when I saw family trees preceding the story, I was relieved, surprised, and delighted to find that the story itself was neither a modern nor a historical fictional murder mystery but research into history by a couple of fictional characters thrown together when one is sent to cheer the other in his hospital bed. Did Richard III of England have two nephews murdered? Was he truly a monster so often depicted? Fascinating.

 

McCann, Colum with Diane Foley. American Mother (nonfiction). What would you expect if a member of your family was taken hostage by terrorists? Government assistance? Rescue? Ongoing updates? Diane Foley got little if any of this, but her son’s gruesome death did not stop her from working to make the future better for others. She even met with one of her son’s kidnappers, presumably also one of his torturers. A remarkable woman.

Quiet interior corner of Platte Township pleased me.

If you’ve read my two previous posts, you already know that I’m currently reading both Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine (daytime) and Jerry Dennis’s A Place on the Water (bedtime), two nonfiction books that could hardly have less in common. Their commonality for me will be their presence, weeks from now, on my June list. Please, don’t let June speed by too fast! – Oh, but Bonnie Jo Campbell is coming to the bookstore on Saturday, June 22, so if Time does fly (as I'm only too sure it will), it will seem all the sooner that Bonnie arrives. And there you have another example of my philosophy of life in a nutshell: Everything is a double-edged sword. 

As I wended (yes!) my way south to make a circuit around Arcadia Marsh and then turn back north and head for home, I was somewhat dismayed at how up-to-date and full of people all the lakeside towns and beaches already were (the first weekend after busy Memorial Day) and how “fancy” so many new businesses seem to be. Even signage for parks and lookouts seemed excessive. Is it just me? Is it just being old? (Probably yes and yes would be the answers there.) It made me sad to see the Big Apple abandoned and derelict, as I remembered the last time the Artist and I stopped there for burgers and beer (the Big Apple opened in 1937, the year the Artist was born), while the ruins of an old building in Elberta seemed nothing short of charming. That sounds inconsistent, but it's the erasure of memories that troubles me. More about that another time.

Away from lakeshores, things are quieter, and I feel more at home. There are still unpaved roads, almost free of traffic -- though I noticed along the edges of one of my favorite back roads here in Leelanau those little orange flags telling me that fiber optic cable for Internet access had been laid down there, too. Is the expectation that this road will eventually be lined with houses? Heaven forbid!

Please do not disturb the shadows!

Everything is Different Everywhere

Wednesday morning, 12/13/23

Everything is different not only from year to year but also from day to day. Yesterday’s fierce, bitter west wind made the air feel ten degrees colder than the temperature reading. Today is still cold, but the sun is shining, and there are more smiles on the faces of even the most rushed pedestrians in Northport. I did my village errands before opening and then found contentment in adding ornaments to my little Charlie Brown tree.

Happy in the bookstore window, sunny today

 

A Recent Encounter and Thoughts It Sparked

 

“It’s not the same town it used to be,” the salesperson muttered bitterly. I was trying on boots and had asked specifically for footwear made in the U.S. or Canada. Her remark about change in Traverse City came as a response to my request and followed her more immediate response: “You won’t find them. No one here wants to work any more. The only boots we can get from China or Vietnam or ….” I forget the third Asian country she named, but in the moment I thought instantly about the wage scale in China, where factories workers are housed in clusters of high-rise dormitories in the middle of nowhere, and so I remarked, “Well, people here don’t want to work for nothing,” but that was the wrong thing to say, because although my tone wasn’t angry, the words were argumentative. I wish it had occurred to me then (and not an hour later) to ask curiously, “Why do you say that?” Maybe we could have had a conversation. Instead, she countered quickly, “They don’t want to work at all!” I still could have asked the question, if I hadn’t let her words and demeanor put me off so completely, but next she made that remark about Traverse City not being the town it used to be, adding, “And it isn’t the same country it used to be, either.”

 

Of course, she was perfectly right to say that Traverse City has changed. Nothing like the small town I moved to in 1970, Traverse City now seems to exhibit growth as such a fast pace that the Artist and I were always exclaiming over new buildings whenever we made the trip to town. Big condominium complexes everywhere, multistory hotels, city traffic! Downtown is still attractive and walkable, and the sidewalks are usually filled with foot traffic (a good sign for a downtown), but the newfangled parking arrangement – meters that take credit cards instead of quarters – discourages some (I am one) from making the effort to shop downtown. Maybe it’s out-of-town visitors in the big hotels who shop Front Street boutiques these days.

 

Luckily, when I inspected the label on the inside of the second pair of boots the gloomy salesperson brought out (the ones I’d initially pointed to in the display), I saw that they were made in Canada. They fit. They were warm and snug and simple. No need to look further. So I got what I came for, and we ended with smiles, but the transaction as a whole left me feeling sad and discontented over a missed connection. I wish I’d had my wits about me in the moment. But going to Traverse City overwhelms me, too, most of the time….

 

Stores and restaurants and traffic and high rises are hardly unique in the American landscape. When I am back in Kalamazoo, there are parts of that city that I barely recognize, and the same is true of Joliet, Illinois, where one of my sisters still lives. Cities everywhere are sprawling outward. Growth in Tucson and Phoenix made those cities’ outlying areas look different from one week to the next as I traveled from ghost town to city hospitals and back in early 2022. Apartment buildings and condos are rising skyward in all American cities. Shops and restaurants have become more expensive (and more like New York) than they ever used to be.

Nothing is the way it used to be. Anywhere.

Part of this sea change is population growth. The world population, 3,695,390,336 in 1970, had grown to 8,045,311,447 by 2023, more than doubling. The population of the United States went from 203,392,031 to an estimated 339,996,563 in the same time period, not doubling but greatly increasing. How could we ever imagine that the world would not change with so many new people in it, including the babies we welcome so joyfully into our own families? 

 

Another aspect of changes, however, as I see it, has to do with expectations, which are much higher than those of the postwar twentieth century. Is it also a greater willingness to carry debt? Refusal to delay or do without gratification? Resignation to “just the way things are”? The average new car today costs two and a half times what my first house cost and five times what my parents paid for their first house. Not that my parents ever bought new cars, and I never have, either, and both of those first houses, I should note, had three bedrooms and a single bathroom -- but who expected more? Our family’s vacations in the 1950s consisted of two weeks in Ohio, one week with one set of grandparents, a second week with the other set – and that was a summer vacation. Winter vacations were unknown except for “jet-setters,” back when only the rich and famous flew around the world for pleasure.

 

Materially speaking, the growing world population on average is richer than ever. Many middle-class Americans are drowning in their own toys! (Are they happier?) However the average is calculated, though, many are left behind, as what was a gap between highest and lowest income levels threatens to become a chasm.

 

Somehow – and I have no basis other than intuition for saying this – I doubt that the unhappy salesperson in the shoe store and I would agree on which changes we see as the most negative or what might be done to mitigate negative effects. Of course, I don’t know that, and obviously she was having a bad day. I remember a day 28 years ago when I had to close my bookstore early, realizing that my mood was not one that walk-in customers should have to meet, and a couple years after that, during summer tourist season, annoyed by being asked the same questions over and over, I had to slap myself upside the face, metaphorically, and tell myself either to get a new attitude or find a different line of work. Attitude is what I changed.

 

I’ve moderated both my moods and my expectations since those early years and grown accustomed to the rhythms of the calendar. I’ll never be rich, but I manage to make a modest living doing something I love in a place where I feel comfortable and visible. A first-time visitor recently assured me that no reader need ever leave my bookstore empty-handed, as there is something for every reading taste. “Write in my guest book!” I urged him shamelessly. Everyone loves to be appreciated! I certainly appreciate my customers and am happy that so many have become my friends over the years. What more could I ask? I am a lucky human being.

 

Welcome!

Additions to Top Recommendations From My 2023 Reading

 

Added to my top fiction and top nonfiction book picks of the year are now: 

 

For fiction, it is, of course, The Waters, by Bonnie Jo Campbell, which I read in an advance review copy, though the release date was pushed from October to January 2024. I’ll be writing more about that novel after the first of the year and hope the author can come to Northport! 

 

For nonfiction, it’s Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, published back in 2020. I read The Warmth of Other Suns earlier but only very recently Caste. Such a brilliant writer and thinker she is, and while you probably know, as I did, the basic historical events, her analysis puts them in a new, pitiless light. How did 2016 happen? Read Chapter 26. That is, read the first 25 chapters, and then Chapter 26. Every American needs to read this book. If you need more convincing, here's an article for you. 

 

Time Is Slipping Away!

 

How does it happen? One day the holidays are visible on a distant time horizon, with weeks available to plan and make ready, and then suddenly  Hanukkah is almost over, and it's less than two weeks until Christmas! Whatever the day on which these thoughts occur to us, however, we are here now. Take a deep breath. Sun or clouds, you are here now.

We Turned the Corner, Walking

The north wind blew for a couple of days, and Leelanau residents and visitors closed their windows against the chill night air. When the wind shifted around and came back from the south, it wasn’t any longer a summer breeze but pleasantly balmy again, as September winds and breezes can be (even with rainclouds above), and so the windows were opened again. Now along county roadsides, pinkish lavender of spotted knapweed and cornflower blue of chicory share the stage with the whites of Queen Anne’s lace umbels and white sweet clover racemes, and there are peaches and nectarines in the markets and on roadside stands.

 

Is September an exciting beginning to a new year for you, or does it signal a bittersweet, melancholy season? Opinions are divided, but I’m wondering if it can’t be both. So few things in life are cut and dried, black or white, don’t you find? The very idea of bittersweetness captures the absence of a clear-cut distinction, and I’m all for the William James’s non-static view of life: 

 

It is, the reader will see, the reinstatement of the vague and inarticulate to its proper place in our mental life which I am so anxious to press on the attention. (Principles of Psychology, 254) 

 

We don’t pass from one “state of mind” block to the next, with a sharp dividing line between them. Thoughts and feelings can be hazy, fringed at the horizon, spreading into one another. Certainly that sounds like the bittersweet feeling Susan Cain describes in her book, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole, about which I wrote a bit last winter.

September 2000 took us to Paris, France.

Whether you find September exciting or melancholy or maybe a bit of both or something else altogether (What else? Pray share!), summer’s end is a good time for poetry. Not that there is a bad time, but September’s apple-scented air seems to call for poetry in a special way, and I’ve been reading High Water Mark: Prose Poems, by David Shumate, rationing the pages so as not to run through the slim volume too fast – and then Fleda Brown’s Flying Through a Hole in the Storm, with its marvelous poem, “Milkweed,” in which these lines appear: 

 

            The stalks remain upright

in spite of their hollowness. Everything is hollow

      in a good way. Everything has finished its job

            and has moved on to the next thing.

 

Brown writes of milkweed’s “bliss of shedding.” Can we learn to do that? To shed blissfully? I need to think about whether or not I want to shed and if so, what....

 

After reaching the end of a very unsatisfying murder mystery on Saturday, I was ready for a dose of good nonfiction and turned to Rebecca Solnit, who never disappoints me. Her book Wanderlust: A History of Walking had a title that called my name. Solnit writes of pilgrimages and labyrinths and has this to say of the latter:

 

In such spaces as the labyrinth, we cross over; we are really traveling, even if the destination is only symbolic, and this is in an entirely different register than is thinking about traveling or looking at a picture of a place we might wish to travel to. For the real is in this context nothing more or less than what we inhabit bodily. A labyrinth is a symbolic journey or a map of the route to salvation, but it is a map we can really walk on, blurring the difference between map and world. If the body is the register of the real, then reading with one’s feet is real [travel] in a way that reading with one’s eyes alone is not. (p. 70)

 

A friend of mine who is a labyrinth facilitator (guide?) would probably appreciate this book, although I suspect she would be impatient with the way the author uses ‘labyrinth’ and ‘maze’ interchangeably, but Solnit did acknowledge on the following page that “many” people distinguish mazes from labyrinths (as does my friend), the former intending to confuse, the latter having only one possible route.

On Sunday morning, the day before Labor Day, I drove down to Cedar. There are many possible routes to take from my house to Cedar and back, and the Artist and I seldom returned north on the same roads we took south. I did not on Sunday morning, either. But, as always, I missed his presence acutely on all the familiar county roads, and so these words of Solnit’s struck a chord with me:

 

…Just as writing allows one to read the words of someone who is absent, so roads make it possible to trace the route of the absent. Roads are a record of those who have gone before, and to follow them is to follow people who are no longer there…. (p. 72)

 

Solnit had in mind “shepherds, hunters, engineers,” etc., but I had in mind my own past and a shared life. We did a lot of “riding around” and “county cruising.” Far from home, too, we sought out back roads, those less traveled, where we might explore at a slower pace than people anxious to get “from Point A to Point B” (as another friend of mine likes to travel). Most of my long walks, on the other hand, not only now that he’s gone but also in the last years of my life with the Artist, were taken with a dog or a friend or friends and dogs (example: in Arizona). He and I didn’t do a lot of walking together, I was thinking, so it’s no wonder my associations are stronger on county roads.

 

But as the book slipped out of my hands and I began to doze (there on the porch, a sweet breeze through the open windows and the dog lying quietly on the floor nearby), memories surged back. Walking home from downtown Kalamazoo, uphill, holding hands, past old historic houses, noticing architectural details. Long-ago nighttime walks through sleepy, dark, summer Leland. On Lake Michigan beaches and along the Lake Superior shore. Wading in the Crystal River (and picking off leeches afterward). A Christmas Day walk through deep snow in Houdek Dunes, having it all to ourselves, our footsteps the first. Strolling in Paris, in Avignon, and oh-so-memorably in Blesle, that sweet medieval village! And, of course, our last long walk through the dear meadow bordering Shell Lake.

In the Yoop

Avignon

Aux Crozes-Hauts -- and still alive!

An unexpected dream come true --

We had many, many memorable walks together over the years, I realize, and seeing them again in my mind, eyes closed, I re-read those happy days, my hand in his, the world sparkling around us.

 

In the meadow, two years ago --

September is a good month for walking, as well as for reading. 

 

And so, now that the season has turned the corner, I’ll be shortening up my open hours to take advantage of “locals’ summer,” adding Tuesday to Monday’s “by chance or appointment” on the schedule line: 

 

 

Dog Ears Books

FALL HOURS

September-October 2023

 

Monday-Tuesday: by chance or appointment

Wednesday – Saturday: 11 a.m. – 5 p.m.

Sunday: Closed

Time for "Locals' Summer"